My first visual memories are of this
framed poster above my crib.
I would stare at it every night before I went to bed.
My father was an underground comic distributor.
He's always been this sort of Zelig of the counterculture
as I like to call him.
Having painted in Warhol's studio,
being roomies with Lou Reed, he knew R. Crumb
and all these great artists of his generation.
I mean, I was brought up on all kinds of wacky visuals as a kid.
So I would stare at this painting over and over:
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch.
It was painted around 1500.
And if you look at these panels long enough,
they start to tell a story.
In the first panel you have Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Birds flying off into the distance,
elephants and giraffe and a lot of religious iconography.
The second panel is where it starts to become
more interesting.
The deadly sins start to infuse their way into the painting.
There's overpopulation, there's debauchery and excess.
And the last panel, which is the most nightmarish one,
especially from a young child's perspective, is this twisted,
decayed, burnt landscape.
A paradise that has been degraded and destroyed.
Man may be unwittingly changing the world's
climate through the waste products of its civilization...
The burning of coal, oil and wood is releasing carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere.
The greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing
our climate now.
Guess where the temperature goes?
It goes up.
Climate change is already in our backyards.
It's official. 2012 was the hottest year in the...
warmest year around the globe
warmest year on record.
It is these activities that drove mankind
out of the Garden of Eden.
- Hi, how are you? - Ah, Mr. DiCaprio.
Pleasure, pleasure.
Great to, great pleasure to see you.
Here.
We can move this.
This can be adjusted.
Oh wow, this is for height control.
Yeah.
- Like this, like this. - For shorter leaders
and taller leaders.
What specific message do you think is the most important?
Climate change is coming much, much faster.
We have seen such, uh, extraordinary extreme weather
patterns.
If you consider this vastness of this universe,
this Planet Earth is just a small boat.
If this boat is sinking, then I think we will have to all
sink together.
I know that he has been a very committed and effective
environmentalist and that is why I really count on your
leadership and vision.
Please welcome newly appointed United Nations
Messenger of Peace, Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio.
Thank you Mr. Secretary General,
Your Excellencies...
I feel incredibly honored that they chose me to be
the United Nations Messenger of Peace on climate change.
I stand before you, not as an expert,
I want to do everything I can to learn more about this issue.
See for myself exactly what's going on and what can be done.
But it all kinda seems beyond our control.
As an actor, I pretend for a living.
I play fictitious characters often solving fictitious
problems.
I believe that mankind has looked at climate change
in that same way.
We keep getting inundated with catastrophic news about the
environment every single day, and the problem seems to be
getting worse and worse and worse.
Try to have a conversation with anyone about climate change,
people just tune out.
If the U.N. really knew how I feel,
how pessimistic I am about our future, I mean, to be honest,
they may have picked the wrong guy.
Hundreds of thousands took to the streets
of New York today demonstrating for action on climate change.
Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon called Leo
a credible voice in the environmental movement,
which is like calling Jeffrey Dahmer a credible voice
for stew.
Leonardo DiCaprio has just naively bought into
the entire global warming hoax.
Who better to educate world leaders on made up
climate change in a crisis that doesn't exist than an actor
from Hollywood with zero years of scientific training?
Hi, how are you?
I'm very good.
How are you doing, it's a pleasure.
You too.
Hey!
Nice to see you, buddy.
Good to see you.
So I just started this new film, it's set in the Western Frontier
of the United States in the early 1800s.
It's basically the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
It has a lot to do with men who are pillaging the natural world,
wiping species out, and basically destroying cultures
in the process.
Those are like buffalo skulls.
Alejandro!
Crazy, are these fur-trappers?
Are these people selling the skulls?
No, these are people selling the skulls, yeah.
What the is this?
Isn't that embarrassing?
Man, that's crazy.
And the fact that they never even reflected on it,
that there's an ending to these animals, and we cannot just,
it's insane.
If you can put that in the movie that would be
unbelievable.
How about this, I dare you!
Ah, okay.
get to the boat. Come on son.
I didn't grow up around nature at all,
I grew up near downtown Los Angeles.
And my escape every weekend was the Natural History Museum.
And from a very young age, I became fascinated with species
that had become extinct.
All these different animals,
from the dodo to the passenger pigeon,
which was the most plentiful bird on earth,
to the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the thilacene
to the great auk, the quagga, the moa.
I remember the anger that I felt,
reading all these stories about how explorers and settlers
would just wipe out an entire species, and in the process,
decimate the ecosystem forever.
The difference now is we're knowingly doing this;
it's just on a much larger scale.
If we're gonna fight climate change effectively,
we have to start by acknowledging that
most of our economy is based on fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are coal, oil, and natural gas.
Oil powers most of the transportation sector,
coal and natural gas power most of the electricity.
Now, in the first couple decades of the twenty-first century,
in order to sustain our dependence on fossil fuels,
we're going to very risky, very extreme new sources.
You see this in things like mountain top removal for coal,
fracking for natural gas,
offshore drilling for oil,
and the tar sands, which is the most devastating form
of producing fossil fuels.
They take away massive forests, the water in the streams
and rivers is poisoned.
It has severe impacts on the wildlife, on native communities,
and it requires a huge amount of energy simply to get it to
our fuel tanks.
There is no such thing as clean fossil fuel.
Headsets are hung up at the back,
but the volume control's right above the microphone so...
The truth is, the more I've learned about this issue
and everything that contributes to the problem,
the more I realize how much I don't know.
How much I don't know about this issue.
The first time I ever heard the term global warming,
which was what it was called back then,
I was in my early twenties.
I had the opportunity to sit down one on one with then
Vice President, Al Gore in the White House.
And he drew a picture of our planet on a chalkboard,
and then he drew the atmosphere around it, and he said,
this is the most important issue of our time.
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
He said all our modes of transportation, boats, trains,
planes, cars, the way we produce our food,
the way we build our cities, almost everything we do releases
carbon dioxide, CO2, and that leads to climate change.
The polar ice caps will melt, the seas will start to rise,
there will be more dangerous weather patterns, floods,
droughts, wildfires.
It sounded like some nightmarish science fiction film.
Except everything he said is real
and it's happening right now.
Wow.
Beautiful.
I just want to know how far we've gone,
how much damage we've done, and if there's anything we can do
to stop it.
You all set, mate?!
So it's the 4th of July,
and we're here in the middle of the Arctic.
Right now we are standing on the ocean,
we are basically walking on water.
This is the northern tip of Baffin Island,
one of the hundreds of islands in the High Canadian Arctic.
We are way above the Arctic Circle,
and if you put your hand in the water,
you would not be able to stand it for more than 5 minutes,
except you who are a badass.
You hunt and fish here, right?
Yeah.
What do you, what do you fish and what do you hunt?
In my territory I hunt fish, seal, narwhal,
and polar bear.
- Is this polar bear? - Yup.
Oh, well there you go!
And the ice here, since you've been around has it been
decreasing?
We used to have a solid ice, blue.
Not light blue like this, blue.
Hard, ice.
Now we usually have a, kind of ice cream type of ice.
It's ice but it's, when it starts to melt,
it melts pretty fast.
Much faster than before.
2040, you will be able to sail over the North Pole.
There's going to be no sea ice left in the Arctic Ocean
in the summer.
We are burning so many fossil fuels that the ice is melting.
The Arctic is like the air conditioning for
the Northern Hemisphere.
If it goes away, that's going to change currents,
that's going to change weather patterns,
that's going to make floods and droughts more catastrophic.
It's the most dramatic transformation of a large
environment ever.
Look at this.
They're right here!
There are about 10,000 to 12,000 narwhals
in this region.
The numbers are stable here, in other regions are declining.
Wow.
That's awesome.
Yeah, they are waiting for the ice to open up,
to swim in, so they can catch the flounder.
I can't believe what they sound like, it's amazing.
They're like purring.
You know, I don't want to be in a planet
without these animals.
He's the chairman of Earth Day 2000,
Leonardo DiCaprio.
When I was 25 years old,
I remember being asked to participate in this huge event
in Washington for Earth Day.
Temperatures are rising, coral reefs are dying,
and not since a meteor hit the earth 65 million years ago,
have so many species of plant and animals become extinct
in such a short time.
I even got a chance to interview the President
of the United States.
Why do you think this issue is so constantly overlooked?
I think it's because it takes a long time
for the climate to change in a way that people feel it,
and because, uh, it seems sort of abstract now.
At the time, it was this huge push to get the word
out on global warming.
Now a couple degrees' difference in today's temperatures
may not seem like an emergency.
Back then everyone was focused on small, individual actions.
We all have to, you know, bring environmentalism to the American
consciousness.
And it boiled down to simple solutions like changing
your light bulb.
It seemed like a positive thing at the time, you know.
Changing your lightbulb.
But it's pretty clear that we're way beyond that point now;
things have taken a massive turn for the worst.
We keep finding things that aren't in the climate models
that are used to project the future.
So that, that tells me that the projections for the future are,
are really conservative.
If climate stays at this temperature that it's been
in the last decade, Greenland is, is going away.
Don't walk into the crevasse.
Oh my God!
Don't get too close to the edge.
Look at how violent that is.
These rapids are going so incredibly fast.
This meltwater is making its way to the sea.
If that's not balanced by snowfall then the ice sheet gets
smaller and sea level rises.
This is actually our proper climate station.
This is a climate station?
I was imagining a massive igloo with all kinds of scientists
doing experiments.
It really does look like broken down pool equipment.
How, what does this connect to?
Well, this is all melted up now,
this was a hose that went down 30 feet,
and now it's melted out.
Wait a minute, so this,
that's lying here used to be straight down under ice?
Yeah, so we made.
So that's the amount of ice that has melted.
Yeah.
This is 5 years of melt.
So this entire length is the thickness of ice that has
melted throughout all of lower Greenland in the past 5 years.
Right.
That's hundreds of cubic kilometers of ice that's now
no longer stored on land.
It's gone into the sea over here.
Miami, New Orleans, Boston and Long Beach,
California may be doomed to fall victim
to ever-rising sea levels.
South Florida as we know it could be washed away
by risings seas.
When you look at places that are the most
susceptible to sea level rise, especially in the United States,
Florida is the key one.
And a lot of the, your campaign was based on um,
giving people an understanding of what's at risk here.
We don't have the liberty or the time
to debate climate change.
If you don't believe in it, I always say
bring your unconverted to us and we'll make sure you agree
that there is a major problem.
We have this thing called sunny day flooding.
Picture a beautiful sunny day,
all of a sudden you see water coming up on the street.
As the sea level rises, the water's coming up,
backflowing into our streets through our drains.
If the city is underwater, there's no future.
How do you combat that?
Exactly what's going on as far as prevention is concerned?
We started putting in pumps, take a look at this.
Oh, this is the pump!
Yup!
We're in the process of building all across the city.
This street right here used to be fully underwater.
During high tide you may need a canoe.
And now what we did was we raised this road and you can see
the difference, see how that area there kind of goes,
slopes down a little bit.
So the main investment is in these systems right here,
raising the roads and the electric pumps.
Yeah, this is a 400-million-dollar project.
City wide.
And of course we're paying for it by our city revenues.
I had to raise tax revenue, which you can imagine is not
a very popular thing to do as a politician.
And this construction is it going to make
- a major difference. - Major difference.
And buy you a significant amount of time.
Absolutely I would think about 40, 50 years.
That's it?
Yes.
Now one of the things I always say when people ask me this,
Mayor what about after 50 years, what's going to happen?
Well what we have to do is come up with solutions,
and unfortunately we have a governor and we have a cabinet
that doesn't believe that this is a major issue.
Officials in Florida were banned from using the words
climate change.
This policy began in 2011 after Rick Scott came into office.
No one really wants to talk about climate change,
especially our senator from Florida, Marco Rubio,
who doesn't believe that we have climate change
and is not interested in assisting our state.
I would hope that he would have gone out and grabbed us federal
funds over the last three years to help make our cities viable.
I do not believe that human activity is causing
these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists
are portraying it.
Why do you think there is such opposition about
the science?
I think it's politics, I think it so has to do with
lobbying and industry and I always say one thing, Leo,
I said uh, the ocean is not Republican
and it's not Democrat, all it knows how to do is rise.
Satellite data show, for the last seventeen years,
there has been no significant recorded warming.
It's supposed to be 70 degrees today,
it's freezing here!
Speaking of global warming where is, we need some global warming!
It's freezing.
There's about as robust a consensus
about human-caused climate change as there is
for any matter in science.
Be it the theory of gravity.
97 percent of climate scientists agree, the globe is warming,
our climate is changing, it's due to fossil fuel burning
and other human activities.
Unfortunately we are fighting this massive disinformation
campaign to confuse the public.
You look at the satellite data we actually
have had no significant warming since 1998 actually no warming.
We have been cooling in recent years.
If you actually believe that global warming
is the biggest problem we face,
you're the dumbest son of a bitch on the planet.
So yeah, maybe you could just talk a little bit
about your background, the studies that you've done.
I was the classic science and math geek
in high school.
Studied physics in graduate school and a decade and half ago
my co-authors and I started to look into climate change
in the more distant past.
We published a curve where there's this long-term cooling
trend and then all of a sudden this abrupt warming
that has no precedent
as far back as you can go and it got named the hockey stick
because it looks like the blade of a hockey stick.
And once we had published that graph I had set myself up
for a completely different life.
And why is that?
What did they do specifically to?
I was vilified on the editorial pages
of the Wall Street Journal, on Fox News.
That I was a fraud.
Other German Scientists have called it
statistical rubbish.
He's been called a statistical charlatan.
I was being attacked by congressmen.
They threw spaghetti up on the wall
and wherever it stuck is what they put in the chart.
I had death threats that were actionable enough that
the FBI at one point had to come to my office to investigate
an envelope that had been sent to me that had a white powder.
I've had threats made against my family.
These folks know they don't have to win the legitimate scientific
debate.
They just need to divide the public,
and all of that hatred and fear is in fact organized and funded
by a few players.
Fossil fuel interests, folks like the Koch brothers finance
a very large echo chamber of climate change denialism.
The reality is a lot of climatologists believe
that the science is not settled.
Global warming is illusory were actually going
through a period of global cooling.
It's easier to believe in a benevolent god
the baby Jesus than it is in some kind of theory about
global warming.
Websites and news outlets and think tanks.
They find people with fairly impressive credentials
who are willing to sell those credentials
to fossil fuel interests.
Dr. Fred Singer, President of the science
and environmental policy project.
The weather balloons around the world show no warming
of the atmosphere in the last 25 years.
You have all of these organizations with lofty
sounding names like Americans for Prosperity
or The Heartland Institute.
These are front groups that are funded by corporate interests.
Americans for Prosperity is really a front group
for the Koch brothers.
That's an organization founded by David and Charles
Koch and good morning to you Tim.
- Good to be here, Bill. - Welcome here,
what are you going to get for your money?
We hope to see policies change.
Koch Industries is one of the largest privately held
fossil fuel interests in the world.
And they are doing everything they can to protect that wealth.
Would you give up all that industrialization,
would you give up all the productivity that it's brought
us, all the lives that it has saved over the last 100 years,
so that the temperature wouldn't rise half a percent
or a milli percent?
They've lobbied Congress.
We keep hearing 2014 has been the warmest year on record,
oh here Mr. President catch this. Mhmm.
James Inhofe is probably the most prominent
congressional climate change denier.
Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated
on the American people.
He's the chair of the Senate Environment Committee.
There are some people who are so arrogant to think
that they are so powerful that they can change a climate.
Man can't change climate.
It might not be surprising to learn that
James Inhofe is one of the largest recipients
of fossil fuel money in the U.S. Senate.
Fossil Fuel interests have bought our House
of Representatives and Senate Environment Committee.
We can't get a climate bill passed through our Congress
because it's controlled by fossil fuel funded
climate change deniers who are blocking any bills
that would attempt to deal with this problem.
How they're able to discredit scientists who have
devoted their life to this issue is kind of mind boggling to me.
It sometimes makes me want to take a drink right.
I'm sure. If I was a scientist
I would be absolutely pissed every single day of my life.
These people are, you know,
engaged in an effort to lead us astray in the name
of short term, you know, fossil fuel profits so that we end up
leaving behind a degraded planet.
What could be more immoral than that?
Even now, man may be unwittingly changing the world's
climate through the waste products of this civilization.
Due to our release through factories and automobiles
every year of more than 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide.
Our atmosphere seems to be getting warmer.
This is bad?
Well it's been calculated a few degrees rise in the earth's
temperature would melt the polar ice caps.
Fact is, we've known about this problem for decades
and decades, for over half a century.
Every day I send you a thousand times more power
than you use in a year.
Anybody working on getting power direct from old glow hard here?
Oh yes but not nearly enough, roll 6b! The solar battery.
Imagine the world right now,
if we had taken the science of climate change seriously
back then.
But our engineers will have to build efficient
generators that spread out over acres, even square miles.
To compete with the cheap coal and oil still available to us.
Since then, our population has increased
by almost 5 billion people and counting.
And China has recently surpassed the United States as the world's
number one polluter.
The problem has become even more difficult to solve.
Oh now we're on the opposite side of the street
again. Ok.
Now we're in a bike lane.
Air-pocalypse, schools have been shut down,
the toxicity has reached that worst level.
It's absolutely brilliant,
you don't allow these companies to operate in the dark.
Chinese media talks about climate change
on a regular basis.
Is there a giant push towards solar and wind here,
is that the next step?
China's got some of the biggest wind and solar companies
in the world now.
Even though China has some of the largest challenges,
like huge population, China's gonna prioritize wind and solar
rather than coal.
If China can do it, then I think the rest of the world can.
China is still heavily relying on fossil fuels,
but they seem to be transitioning to renewables
much faster than anyone anticipated.
The question is, can less developed countries with rapidly
growing populations make the same transition?
India is the world's third largest emitter
yet the country is struggling with massive power shortages
and rolling blackouts.
India has consistently said that its biggest priority
is development and bringing people out of poverty.
We care about climate change.
But the fact is we are a country where energy access is as much
a challenge as climate change.
We need to make sure that every Indian has access to energy.
From what I understood there are 300 million people
without power, without light here in India.
Yes, yes.
That's equivalent to the entire population here
of the United States.
Today in villages, Indian villages you will find
people take cow dung and they make what is known,
called cow dung cakes or uples in Hindi,
and they burn those.
And that's their only source of cooking energy.
So they will make food now over this.
Coal is cheap whether you and I like it or not,
coal is cheap.
You have to think about this from this point of view.
If you created the problem in the past,
we will create it in the future.
We have 700 million households who cook using biomass today,
700 million households.
If those households move to coal you have that much more use
of fossil fuels, then the entire world is fried.
If anyone gives you this very cute stuff and tells you,
Oh the world's poor should move to solar, and,
Why do they have to make the mistakes that we have made?
I hear this all the time from American engineers.
And I'm like, wow!
You know, I mean, if it was that easy I would have really liked
the U.S. to move towards solar, but you haven't.
Let's put our money where our mouth is.
We have to practice what we preach.
Absolutely.
I am sorry to say this, I know you're an American,
and please don't take this amiss,
but your consumption is going to really put a hole in the planet.
And I think that's the conversation we need to have.
I'll show you charts from this perspective,
electricity consumed by one American at home is equivalent
to 1.5 citizens of France, 2.2 citizens of Japan,
and 10 citizens of China, 34 of India, 61 of Nigeria.
Why?
Because you're building bigger, you're building more
and using much more than before.
The fact is that we need to put the issue of lifestyle
and consumption at the center of climate negotiations.
Look I, there is no way I don't agree with you,
how can you argue that?
You're absolutely correct and I think yes,
it's a very difficult argument to present to Americans
that we need to change our lifestyle and I would also
argue that it's probably not going to happen.
So we are dependent, if we want to solve the climate crisis,
on the fact that hopefully renewables like solar and wind
will become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper the more money
we funnel into them, the more we invest into them and ultimately
it will solve that problem.
But I, you're shaking your head obviously.
I'm shaking my head Indian style which means no.
Right.
Who will invest, Leo?
Let's be real about this,
who will invest and how will you invest in it?
We are doing more investment in solar today,
China is doing much more investment in solar today
than the U.S. is.
What is the U.S. doing which the rest of the world
can learn from?
You're a fossil-addicted country,
but if you are seriously disengaging it's something
for us to learn from.
And it will be leadership that we can all hold up
to our government and say listen if the U.S. can do it
and the U.S. is doing it, in spite of all their pressures,
we can do it as well.
The sad part of it is, it's just not happening.
And people like me, we are rich enough to withstand
the first hit of climate change but it's the poor of India,
it's the poor of Africa, it's the poor of Bangladesh,
who are impacted today by what I believe is the first signs
of climate change.
So February and March, which is when the crops
are standing, they got half the year's rainfall
in just five hours.
Half the year's rainfall in five hours?
So these crops are all destroyed?
Yeah destroyed.
Your back is breaking doing this and then you get one unseasonal
rainfall, it's absolutely like the last straw
on the camel's back.
And we need countries to believe that climate change is real
and urgent.
It's not a figment of their imagination.
The U.S. has been the biggest emitter of greenhouse
gases in history, and there's no doubt that we've all benefited
from fossil fuels.
I know I have.
My footprint is probably a lot bigger than most people's,
and there are times when I question,
what is the right thing to do?
What actions should we be taking?
There are over a billion people out there without electricity,
and they want lights, they want heat,
they want the lifestyle that we've had in the United States
for the last hundred years.
If we're gonna solve this problem,
we all have a responsibility to set an example,
and more than that, help the developing world transition
before it's too late.
We are seeing events that we did not see in the past.
It's not about when the entire islands are underwater.
It's well before then is going to be the crisis.
And it's already happening.
What we are facing at the moment is severe flooding.
It's gone into the fresh water ponds and that's how people
get their drinking water.
Have you spoken with people in the scientific
community that have given you some sort of a time frame?
Given the scenarios and the projections put forward
by the science, our islands will be underwater,
and so the question is, what do we do about it?
At the moment, internally, we are relocating our communities
from certain parts of the island to where the water
has not come up.
But our long-term strategy is something that I've been
discussing internationally, because we,
we have to come to accept the reality that we may not be able
to accommodate all of our people.
We have adopted a policy of migration with dignity.
We bought a piece of land in Fiji,
so that if our people choose to migrate today, they can do it.
Hmm.
They must do it as a matter of choice.
I've got grandchildren.
I've got 12 grandchildren.
I'd like to be able to, to go away knowing that
they will continue to have a home.
Islands in the Pacific,
we're a paradise in peril.
Throughout Palau we have sea level rise coming
into the farmlands, coming into the homes.
This is unbelievable.
When was this an intact island with homes on it?
How long ago?
12 years ago, when you came,
there were people living here.
So, within the 12-year period this is the result.
It's just a small picture of one place.
The small island nations who contribute the least
to the causes of climate change,
are actually going to feel the worst uh, impacts.
The worst scenarios because of global warming.
What we've done to the rest of the world is just,
it's criminal.
It's not just sea level rise.
We've taken these coastal ecosystems that used to be
dominated by incredibly abundant fish,
and we've knocked the whole system down reversing
half a billion years of evolution.
One billion people depend on fisheries from coral reefs
for virtually all of their protein.
One billion people.
Here we are, we're on what was a pretty healthy coral reef.
What's missing?
You see almost nothing swimming around.
Is this a dying coral reef?
I think this reef has had it.
We're pushing the system really hard and that is a serious enemy
to the health of corals and their ability to grow.
Mhm.
It's causing loss of people's livelihoods.
It's causing starvation.
This is happening all over.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
I think reefs as we know them are gonna virtually disappear.
The oceans are like this big buffer because they absorb
carbon dioxide.
They take up about a third of the CO2 that we dump
into the atmosphere.
So because of that, they are a stabilizing force in climate.
The problem is the ocean can't do its job fast enough
with this absurd rate of carbon dioxide emissions.
You know, life isn't gonna disappear in the ocean.
There will always be life in the ocean,
but it's not gonna be necessarily the kind of life
we want.
We could go back to 3 billion years ago and have just
a whole lot of slime.
We're taking away the ecosystems that normally help us
to restabilize the climate.
Like oceans, rainforests absorb carbon from our atmosphere.
Decades and decades of the forests breathing in the carbon,
storing it in the trunks and the leaves and the organic matter.
Those carbon emissions are being held safe for us.
Until we clear them, and light them on fire.
It acts like a carbon bomb and releases massive carbon
emissions back into the atmosphere.
Wow, this haze is intense isn't it?
You can't see anything here!
This is scary.
This isn't natural? This is all fire?
This is not natural at all.
I've never seen anything like this.
There are three big tropical rainforest areas
left in the world.
The Amazon in South America, the Congo Basin in Africa,
and the South East Asian rainforest which spans
Indonesia.
In Indonesia, we're seeing fires being intentionally set
in order to create palm oil plantations,
which grow the cheapest vegetable oil in the world.
It's in cooking oils, in processed foods,
in your cosmetics, in your detergents.
This really cheap commodity is making companies tremendous
profits.
Just as far as you can see.
Rows of palm oil.
They have destroyed so much of this forest, it's unbelievable.
What a beauty!
I can't even comprehend what these forests
must have looked like.
Forests where rhino and elephant and orangutan would be populated
into the thousands.
These guys are a byproduct of the forest lost
because of the palm oil industry.
You know, they're effectively refugees from forests
that no longer exist.
Wow, that's a good grip.
Yeah!
Strong.
Hey, I'm gonna get you some fruit, don't be scared.
The carrot or the fruit?
Definitely the fruit, that's what you guys are after, huh?
There you go.
Do you like carrots? Or, not so much?
Oh my God.
These are amazing.
Aw.
I always remind people when they go,
Aw, the poor thing, you know, these are the lucky survivors.
What happens to all the other orangutan?
You know, all the others are dead.
And the reason people are chopping down the forest
to plant palm oil plantations is because people keep buying
the stuff.
People have to realize that what they do in their supermarket,
the decisions they make in their daily lives,
are affecting places like the Leuser ecosystem.
If palm oil is in almost everything we buy,
how are consumers supposed to avoid this?
If these products have such a devastating impact,
why aren't governments setting restrictions to prevent
these big corporations from destroying the planet
just so they can save money?
If you want something that you can do without
appealing to any higher authorities,
such as government or whatever, I can't think of an easier, um,
out, than changing your diet.
You can start tonight.
So you're a scientist who studies the effects
of agriculture on climate, but you grew up raising cattle
and taking them to slaughter, right?
I'm a scientist, that's the most important thing.
So, of all the reasons for tropical deforestation,
the foremost is beef.
And beef is one of the most inefficient uses of resources
on the planet.
In the U.S., 47 percent of land is used for food production,
and of that, the lion's share is just to grow feed for cattle.
The things that we actually eat, like fruit, vegetable, nuts,
it's a percent.
Most importantly, cows produce methane,
and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas.
The way cows produce methane is they eat as much as they can,
and when they are chewing, a whole bunch of methane is burped
through the mouth uh, into the atmosphere.
The atmosphere has much more CO2 in it.
But Methane is far more impactful.
Every molecule of methane is equivalent to 23 molecules
of CO2.
And of the methane in the atmosphere,
nearly all of it is due to livestock.
In comparison to emissions from other sources,
what kind of percentage are we talking about come from
the consumption of beef?
About 10, 12 percent of the total U.S.
emissions is due to beef.
It's staggering.
But it's very easy to envision a dietary shift,
even as minor as switching, let's say,
from beef to an alternative.
Let's say even chicken.
The chicken will require 20 percent of the land,
and 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions.
And if you compare, rice, or potato, or wheat,
beef requires 50 times as much land.
So even cutting the amount of beef that you eat
in half, or by a quarter, could make a significant difference.
It, very significant.
Do you, do you at all think that that's even
a possibility considering that beef is so a part
of our culture?
Maybe not everybody's ready to eat tofu, you know,
24/7.
I get that.
But even if you just have to have some flesh between
your teeth, if you switch to chicken,
you will have eliminated 80 percent of you what you emit,
depending on where you are coming from.
Let's face it, it's fairly easy to switch your diet
from one choice to another.
While working on the Revenant,
which is about man's struggle with the elements,
we shot on location in the Canadian snow belt.
The irony was we were hit in with record temperatures
that completely melted our set.
In order to finish making the movie,
we had to relocate halfway around the world just to find
snow.
The fact that we have to come,
200 people in the middle of the summer,
to the winter in Southern Ushuaia,
9000 miles from where we're supposed to be shooting
this three months ago, chasing ice, is because it's melting.
It was a very, very warm winter.
We came down to the southern tip of our continent
besides the South Pole, to film this, cause this is where
this, this, the last snow is left.
I think that, my point of view I was saying
to my, to my son, I said, you know, it's funny that,
it's very sad but probably for you kids,
to see snow will be a super eccentric adventure.
A few people will be able to see snow in the future.
I feel like I'm in some weird, surreal movie.
I honestly look around, and I think, when I have children,
everything that we now take for granted,
our planet and all of its biodiversity and beauty.
Everything in the future is gonna be different.
Every single light that you see has to be completely different.
It has to come from a different power source.
We need to build all those things differently,
all the cars that are on the road need to be different.
And this is one city, and if you zoom out onto a large map
of planet earth at night, you see electrification
all over the world.
And we're fighting powerful fossil fuel interests
that basically want to keep doing business as usual.
How can we possibly turn this all around?
The fossil fuel industry is the biggest industry
in the world.
They have more money and more influence than any other sector,
so I mean, the more that there can be sort of popular uprising
against that, the better.
But I think the scientific fact of the matter is,
we are unavoidably headed towards some level of, of harm.
So, the sooner we can take action,
the less harm will result.
Wow. Holy crap.
That's a good robot.
Whoa!
What is your grand vision for all of this?
The point of the Gigafactory is to get the cost
of batteries down to the point where it's affordable.
Right.
Batteries are critical to the sustainable energy future.
The sun doesn't shine all the time, so,
you've got to store it in a battery.
How is this gonna help developing nations that
have massive populations that need to have power?
So, the advantage of solar and batteries is that
you can avoid building electricity plants at all.
So you could be in a remote village and have solar panels
that charge a battery pack, that then supplies power to the,
to the whole village, without ever having to run
thousands of miles of high voltage cable over the place.
It's like, what happened with
landline phones versus cellular phones,
in a lot of developed countries they just didn't do
the landline phones, they just went straight to cellular.
And we actually did the calculations today, like,
what would it take to transition the whole world to, uh,
sustainable energy.
What kind of throughput would you actually need?
Um, and you'd need 100 gigafactories. So.
100 of these?
100 of these, yes.
That would make the United States.
No, the whole world.
The whole world?
The whole world.
All energy.
- That's it?! - Yeah.
That sounds, that doesn't sound.
It's manageable.
That sounds manageable.
Yeah.
The Gigafactory, when it's complete,
will have the largest footprint of any building in the world.
Counting multiple levels, it could be as much as 15 million
square feet.
So, Tesla can't build 100 gigafactories.
The thing that's really gonna make a difference is if
companies that are much bigger than Tesla do the same thing.
If the big industrial companies in China, and U.S., and Europe,
the big car companies, if they also do this,
then collectively we can accelerate the transition
to sustainable energy.
And if government sets the rules to favor sustainable energy,
we can get there really quickly.
But it's really fundamental.
Unless there's a price put on carbon.
We're never gonna be able to make the transition
that we need to in time. Correct?
Yeah.
And the only way to do that is basically with a carbon tax.
Okay, now walk me through a carbon tax,
which is what you're saying, is the silver bullet
for climate change.
Well the carbon tax would be basically a tax on
any kind of activity that put carbon into the atmosphere.
So when you tax something, you raise the price,
people are gonna tend to consume less of it.
In fact that's sort of lesson number one of economics.
So you're teaching economics at Harvard,
and you literally wrote the book on contemporary economics,
right?
Well if I'm teaching the course for many years,
I might as well write the textbook to go with it.
So just to be clear, you've worked with a lot of
Republican heavyweights, John McCain, Mitt Romney,
and you worked for George Bush when he became president.
I was chairman of the council of economic advisors.
So how come we don't have a carbon tax already?
Politicians don't always do what professors
want them to do.
So the basic idea is that we wanna tax bad activities
that have negative side effects on other people in society.
So we'd raise the price of cigarettes by putting a tax
on cigarettes, people are gonna consume fewer cigarettes.
Climate change involves a variety of negative side effects
and costs.
A carbon tax forces people to take account of those costs.
I think trying to appeal to people's social responsibility
is really very, very hard, because people have complicated
lives and they have lots of things to worry about,
they don't want to have to think about climate change
every time they do every decision. They can't.
And every time you turn on your car, are you supposed to think,
Uh oh, what am I doing to the climate?
What the carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction
of doing the right thing.
So lemme get this straight.
You're a Republican, who wants more taxes?
Well, one of the important things to keep in mind
is that if you have a carbon tax,
you can turn around and cut other taxes in response.
For example, payroll taxes.
This is a tax shift rather than a tax increase.
So is it possible to ever pass a carbon tax now,
given the current political situation?
I mean, half the people in office still don't believe
in climate change.
Yes we can!
During the campaign, President Obama didn't wanna say
the word carbon tax, because it would poll terribly.
If we wanna change the president's view of carbon
taxes, we need to change the public's view of carbon taxes.
Think of gay marriage.
Remember Barack Obama ran against gay marriage.
I, uh, am not a supporter of gay marriage.
When did he switch?
When the polls started switching.
I think same-sex couples should be able
to get married.
Politicians, whether we call them our elected leaders,
are really our elected followers.
They do what the people want them to do.
We need to preach to the American people.
Once the American people are convinced,
the politicians will fall in line very quickly.
President Obama and representatives from nearly
200 other countries are trying to reach an agreement to keep
global warming in check.
In December, the world will come together at the U.N.
Climate Conference in Paris, and we will see whether or not
we can muster the collective political will to reach
an ambitious, comprehensive agreement.
This is a critical year.
Leo. How you doing, man?
Thank you for your time, I really appreciate it.
Last time we had a hug everybody had a, did you see,
it was all over the thing? It was pretty dangerous.
Oh, really? Oh, yes I remember that.
I forgot about that!
Good to see you, Secretary.
So, after decades of failed negotiations,
what makes this negotiation different from all the rest?
I remember the footage of George Bush Sr. saying
we've just learned about this thing called global warming.
We come to Rio proud of what we've accomplished
and committed to extending the record on American leadership
on the environment.
I mean, we had climate summit after climate summit,
and we've seen so little action.
Well, let me tell you why this is different,
and it really is different.
Last year President Obama was able to stand up in Beijing
with the Chinese President Shi
and announce intended reductions in emissions for Paris.
Well guess what, when the two largest economies
in the world and the two largest emitters in the world stand up
and make a statement like that,
that's created a momentum that never existed before.
A lot of things are coming together.
Tragically, the full measure of the negative impact
of climate change is coming together too.
What's happening now is that you have mass populations
that are moving as a result of climate.
Or you have huge fights over water,
which could erupt into wars.
And any extremist philosophy could appeal
to people if they have nowhere to live, no way to live,
and that's when people are vulnerable.
If anybody thinks I'm kidding about that,
it's happening today.
And the greatest fear about all of this is leaving this planet
in better shape than we were given it and that's not
what we're doing today.
Today I spend most of my time on understanding
how can we secure a prosperous future for humanity
in a situation where we're starting to hit the ceiling
of what the planet can cope with.
And I have the privilege of chairing something called
the Earth League, which is a network of leading earth system
scientists, try and gather really all the knowledge we have
on understanding our future on, on earth.
We are on average moving towards a four degrees warming
this century.
And we haven't been in a four-degree warmer world, um,
for the past four million years.
So it's not as if it's a place we know very well.
So give me one, sort of picture of what the world
may look like if we do not take action.
To begin with, for the past twelve thousand years,
temperatures are almost miraculously stable.
In fact, average temperatures vary within only plus minus
one degrees Celsius during this entire period.
This perfect planet with this perfect atmosphere.
Yeah. Exactly.
And so, let us then move upwards in temperature.
Where are we right now?
Well, today we're approaching one degree Celsius.
Already it just, 0.85 degrees, we're seeing faster
than predicted impacts.
This storm is so big, so vast,
60 million Americans will feel its power.
We're in a historic drought.
The world's coral reefs begin to collapse
even before two degrees.
And we're predicted to hit 1.5, to 2 degrees. So.
Already now. So.
That's already probably gonna happen.
At 3, 4 degrees, we will have heat waves which makes
many regions in the world not livable any longer.
Agriculture will be collapsing around the equator.
That would take us beyond being able to responsibly
feed humanity.
What makes scientists so nervous is that we can reach a point
where earth takes over and starts reinforcing warming.
This is what we call tipping points,
and the most obvious one is Greenland.
Greenland, for the first time, is melting on its entire surface
to a point where, instead of being a white surface,
becomes a dark surface, and suddenly instead of becoming
a cooler, becomes a self-heater.
Because, because of the fact the ice can no longer
reflect back.
Just the color change.
Just the color change of the ice.
Suddenly, all these feedbacks start kicking in.
Methane stuck under frozen permafrost thaws to a point
where it starts getting released.
And that in turn warms the planet even more,
which releases more methane.
Correct.
That's if we don't take immediate action.
Yes. That's business as usual.
But the Paris Climate Summit that we are soon approaching
in December, if world leaders come together properly,
the window is open, but barely open,
to transition back into a stable planet.
Last time we had our climate summit,
you couldn't say that we could go to scale on high tech,
clean energy solutions.
But now in Paris, we can say so.
We actually have the proof.
You know you wake up in Germany Saturday morning,
you're likely to get 30 percent of your electricity
from solar and wind, and not from a few energy utilities,
but from over 2 million citizens delivering to a grid.
Denmark today produces over 100 percent, some days,
of its electricity needs from wind.
100 percent.
It's totally renewable.
And remember that, once you've invested in wind and solar,
you actually have free energy forever.
¶ ¶
In countries like my own, in Sweden,
there was an enormous uprising among people.
You know, from youth groups to citizen side organizations,
to the point that the prime minister announced three weeks
back that Sweden will now become the world's first
fossil fuel-free nation.
- Congratulations. - I was shocked
at the way that it propelled itself from below.
I think we have tipped the world toward a sustainable future.
The fear is are we doing it too slowly?
Ladies and gentleman,
you are here today to write the script for a new future.
The fate of our planet is in your hands.
I am a small island girl with big dreams from the Island
of Majuro in the Marshall Islands.
Back when I was six or seven,
my grandpa told me about how the ice in the North Pole
and the South Pole will melt away,
and as they melt, the water will rise and soon flood our islands.
This agreement is for those of us whose identity,
whose culture, whose ancestors, whose whole being is bound
to their lands.
This agreement will help the world prepare
for the impacts of climate change that are already here,
and also, for those we know are now headed our way inevitably.
Nearly a quarter of a century of global climate talks
have come to this pivotal moment in Paris.
195 countries saying they'll do everything in their power
to change.
There's no doubt that this agreement is a massive step
forward.
But does it go far enough?
The Paris Agreement calls for keeping climate
warming to well below two degrees Celsius,
while striving for 1.5.
There's no mention of a carbon tax,
there's no mention of any penalties.
There are no enforcement provisions.
We just have to take it on faith that all these
countries are gonna follow through with what they say.
How likely is that?
This is an unattainable deal that Congress
has already voted to reject.
The fact that we're going to have a 26-28 percent
reduction in CO2 emissions, that isn't gonna happen.
I chair the committee that has jurisdiction
over the Environmental Protection Agency.
Hey man.
Good to see ya.
- Thank you so much. - You doing alright?
Absolutely.
Alright. C'mon.
The Paris Agreement ended up being a historic agreement,
not because it gets us to where we need to be eventually,
but for the first time, locking in all countries into verifiable
steps and targets that they're gonna take.
It creates the architecture that allows us to finally start
dealing with this problem in a serious way.
So you were happy with what came of it?
I, I, I was happy that we put the architecture
in place.
The, the targets that have been set in Paris are nowhere near
enough for what the scientists tell us we have to do eventually
to solve this problem.
But if we can use the next 20 years to apply existing
technologies to reduce carbon emissions,
and then start slowly turning up the dials as new technologies
come on line, so that we have more and more ambitious targets
each year, then, we're not gonna completely reverse the warming
that now is inevitable, but we can stop it before it becomes
catastrophic.
And it's no secret that you've been under great
opposition to try to implement some of your climate change
initiatives. And.
We've got some folks on the other side. Yeah.
So someone that comes into office that does not
believe in the science of climate change,
do they have the capacity and the power to dismantle
everything that you've already worked for?
Even if somebody came in, campaigning on denying
climate science, reality has a way of, you know,
hitting you in the nose if you're not paying attention.
And I think that the public is starting to realize the science,
in part because it's indisputable.
Admire your optimism.
- Yeah. - But
you start to look at the science,
look at what's going on in the Antarctic and,
and scientists saying that there are sections of ice that
guarantee four to six meters of ocean level rise,
which will be catastrophic for the future.
You are the leader of the Free World.
You have access to information that most people do not.
What makes you terrified for the future?
Uh, a huge portion of the world's population
- lives near oceans. - Mhm.
If they start moving, then you start seeing,
um, scarce resources.
The subject of competition between populations.
This is the reason why the Pentagon has said,
this is a national security issue.
This isn't just an environmental issue.
This is a national security issue.
You know, in addition to just the sadness that I would feel if
my kids can never see a glacier, the way I saw when I went up
to Alaska, uh, you know, that's the romantic side of it.
That's the side that takes a walk with my daughters
and I wanna be able to, them to see, or my grandkids,
I want them to see the same things as I saw
as I was growing up.
Even if you were unsentimental about that,
in very hard-headed terms, you've gotta worry about
the national security implications of this,
and the capacity for the existing world order
as we understand it to survive the kinds of strains
that the scientists are predicting without action.
This is why we have to take action now.
If we keep pushing keep prodding and most importantly keep
educating the public there's no reason why, uh,
we can't solve this problem in time.
Thank you for your time, Mr. President.
You bet.
Thanks for the good work you're doing.
- Thank you so much. - Alright. Good?
I have realized that as a science community we have not
done the best job, frankly, of communicating this threat
to the public.
But when you go up there and see it with your own eye,
how thin the world's atmosphere is,
tiny little onion skin around the earth.
That's all the oxygen that we breathe, that's the CO2,
everything we burn goes into it.
It's an astonishingly fragile film.
You know, I knew intellectually how the earth's system works,
'cause that's what I've been doing for 20 years.
To see how the atmosphere and the ocean,
all the elements in the system work together.
So I understood it intellectually.
Mhm.
But it's like being an ant trying to understand
what an elephant looks like by crawling all over the elephant.
But when you're up there in orbit,
and you can see 1200 miles in any direction, I mean,
let me tell you.
It's kind of a revelation.
Seeing all the cities at night, millions of people all working
away, doing something.
Come around the day side of the world,
seeing the natural systems.
The hurricanes, huge, great big wheels, you know,
over the oceans.
Saw the Amazon River go between my feet.
For like five minutes, you know, I have a whole green carpet
either side.
Just beautiful, all the way out to the sea.
And you know there was the sun coming up over the Amazon,
the whole forest waking up, and doing what it does every day,
you know. Breathing in and breathing out.
So I, I, you know, at the end of all that I became immensely
fond, more fond of the planet. You know?
Which I never thought about when I actually just live
on the surface.
I'm also kind of fond of the people on there, too.
It's like being taken away from your family and coming back.
And um, you know, I wish it all well.
I, uh, just before Christmas I got told I got pancreatic
cancer.
Stage 4, so it's also elsewhere in me, not just in one place.
So um, you know, the, the odds are I won't be around
for very long.
You know, it's a very small chance of survival.
So, uh, that's really motivated me to think about
what's important to do, and what can I contribute in the time
I have left.
So this is a model simulation of the earth, now,
we have about 20 satellites that are dedicated to looking
at the earth, every day.
One looks at clouds, one looks at the sea surface temperature,
Oko looks at carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
All this information comes in, and this is the tool we use
to do climate simulation.
Here's an example of one thing we could see: this is
ocean surface temperature, as measured from space.
This is the whole world's surface temperature.
You can see the poles melting, there.
Wow.
- Yeah. - It's amazing.
This is the way to do it man.
This is the way to really see what's going on.
Here's the Gulf Stream, look at this.
It's like a motion of the ocean.
This is like a great piece of art.
It is, isn't it?
Biggest impact would be here.
- In the Gulf Stream. - Yeah.
This current here, see it?
The dumping of ice off melting Greenland,
would stop this conveyor belt, and the Gulf Stream would slow
down, stopping the transport of heat from here, to there.
And then Europe would get cold toes.
Because there's a lot of heat transport from the Tropics,
across the North Atlantic, that keeps Europe warm. I mean.
So Europe would get colder?
Yeah.
Cause that's the big misconception about
climate change, is that everything gets warmer.
- Yeah. - Wow.
And here's the most advanced precipitation satellite
in the world.
This is very important, cause we think the biggest impact from
climate change is the moving of the precipitation belts.
From the equator they'll go further out,
so we're already seeing signs of a system drought.
So that causes more drought in places
- that are already too hot. - Yes.
And there's a lot of papers written in the State Department
and elsewhere, how that sustained drought has helped
fuel the conflict of the Syrian civil war, Darfur, Sudan,
all these places that are short of water, short of food.
Is this throughout the entire planet or is it just this
- particular region right here? - Nope.
We expect the whole world.
We expect bits of India we expect in the U.S., Oklahoma.
You know the dust bowl region, we expect that to get
much, much drier over the next few decades.
Oh my God, and what about my home state
of California here?
Um, not looking great, I'm afraid.
Now predicted persistent drought in the dust bowl, and here,
for fifty years from now.
But we're just seeing the worst drought in 900 years
here right now.
So it's coming a bit earlier than we thought.
We're talking about this happening over a period
of a few decades.
It's just consistent not great news.
No.
But a lot of people now kinda confused about the issue.
You know, the facts are crystal clear.
The ice is melting, the earth is warming,
the sea level is rising.
Those are facts.
Rather than feeling, oh my God it's hopeless, say, okay,
this is the problem.
Let's be realistic.
Let's find a way out of it.
And there are ways out of it.
You know, if we stopped burning fossil fuel right now,
the planet would still keep warming for a little while
before cooling off again.
So you're saying that if we do the right thing,
we're gonna heat up, or we're gonna.
It'll turn off, then it'll start cooling again.
Would that Arctic ice sheet start to then increase
again?
Once the cooling started, yeah.
So there really is a possibility to repair
- this trajectory that we're on? - Absolutely.
- Interesting. - Yeah. So there's hope.
You seem to have an incredibly positive attitude,
just about everything though. It's amazing.
Yeah, I, I do, I'm actually basically an optimistic
kind of person.
I have faith in people.
I, I really do have faith in people.
And I think that once people come out of the fog of confusion
or an issue, or initial uncertainty on an issue,
and realistically appreciate it at some level, the threat,
and they're informed of what the best action is to deal with it,
they got on and did it.
And what seemed like almost impossible to deal with,
you know, became possible.
I still think a lot about that picture that used
to hang over above my crib.
The story of The Garden of Earthly Delights actually begins
on the outside of the painting,
where. Bosch painted a view of our Earth on the third day
of creation.
It's almost as if he wanted to show the fragility of our
planet by depicting the earth and its atmosphere enclosed
in glass.
Pope Francis has officially released
his encyclical on the environment.
The document is both a call for immediate action to stop
global warming, and a cry for justice for the poor.
Our common home has fallen into serious disrepair.
Hope would have us recognize that there is always a way out.
That we can always redirect our steps,
that we can always do something to solve our problems.
Still, we can see signs that things are now reaching
a breaking point.
This is a direct message from the pope, it's a huge deal.
One of the most important spiritual leader's
on the planet.
DiCaprio.
He has now called upon the world community to accept
the modern science of climate change.
A pope has never done anything like this in history.
Being able to spend time and sit with the pope
was a pretty profound experience.
This is a book, Hieronymus Bosch's.
Uh, it was hanging above my crib, as a young boy.
Thank you.
There was definitely an urgency in his voice.
He said that as far as the Paris conference is concerned, he,
he felt was a step in the right direction,
but certainly not enough.
He feels we all need to keep speaking out about this issue
as loud as we can, and that we must immediately take action.
But more than anything, he said to pray for the human race.
After everything I've seen, it's become pretty obvious
that we're no longer living in that first,
unspoiled depiction of Eden.
We're in that second panel.
What Bosch called, Human Kind Before the Flood.
And what haunts me the most is that last panel.
The one with the charred, blackened skies.
A planet that we collectively have left to ruin.
The question is, can we change our course in time?
Now if this was a movie we could write the ending of this script,
and we could figure a way out of this mess.
But real life doesn't work like that,
and we can't pretend that we know how this is gonna end.
The only thing that we can do is control what we do next,
how we live our lives, what we consume, how we get involved,
and how we use our vote to tell our leaders that we know
the truth about climate change.
The last speaker for this signing ceremony is
the Academy Award Best Actor,
and the United Nations Messenger of Peace, Mr. Leonardo DiCaprio.
Thank you Mr. Secretary General for
the honor to address this body, and thanks to the distinguished
climate leaders assembled here today who are ready
to take action.
As a U.N. Messenger of Peace I have traveled all over the world
for the last two years, I have seen cities like Beijing choked
by industrial pollution, ancient boreal forests in Canada
that have been clear cut, and rainforests in Indonesia
that have been incinerated.
In India I met farmers whose crops have been literally
washed away.
In America I've witnessed sea level rise flooding the streets
of Miami.
In Greenland and in the Arctic I was astonished to see
that ancient glaciers are rapidly disappearing,
well ahead of scientific predictions.
All that I have seen and learned on my journey has absolutely
terrified me.
Now think about the shame that each of us will carry when our
children and grandchildren look back and realize that we had
the means of stopping this devastation but simply lacked
the political will to do so.
Yes, we have achieved the Paris Agreement.
More countries have come together here to sign
this agreement today than for any other cause in the history
of humankind, and that is reason for hope.
But unfortunately the evidence shows us that it will not
be enough.
A massive change is required right now.
One that leads to a new collective consciousness.
A new collective evolution of the human race,
inspired and enabled by a sense of urgency from all of you.
We can congratulate each other today,
but it will mean absolutely nothing if you return
to your countries and fail to push beyond the promises
of this historic agreement.
After 21 years of debates and conferences,
it is time to declare no more talk, no more excuses,
no more ten-year studies, no more allowing the fossil fuel
companies to manipulate and dictate the science and policies
that affect our future.
The world is now watching.
You'll either be lauded by future generations,
or vilified by them.
You are the last best hope of Earth.
We ask you to protect it,
or we, and all living things we cherish, are history.
¶ We wait ¶
¶ We pray for the rain ¶
¶ For the rain ¶
¶ For a rain ¶
¶ To wash away ¶
¶ We try ¶
¶ Deny ¶
¶ To believe to believe ¶
¶ to believe ¶
¶ We can't believe ¶
¶ In anything ¶
¶ I don't want to say goodbye ¶
¶ Stars falling from the sky ¶
¶ We will all be judged ¶
¶ By what we leave behind ¶
¶ I don't want to say goodbye ¶
¶ Hey ¶
¶ Too late ¶
¶ To look you in the eye ¶
¶ In your eyes ¶
¶ And realize ¶
We find.
¶ In time we're the same ¶
¶ We're the same ¶
¶ All to blame ¶
¶ I don't want to say goodbye ¶
¶ Stars falling from the sky ¶
¶ We will all be judged ¶
¶ By what we leave behind ¶
¶ I don't want to say goodbye no, no, no, no... ¶
¶ no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no ¶
¶ I just need a minute to breathe ¶
¶ I just need... ¶
¶ ...a minute to breathe ¶